December 4, 2024 – Over the past several months, independent journalists have brought to light the stories of several women in Georgia and Texas dying because of abortion bans. These women all experienced life-threatening pregnancy complications. Yet when they arrived at emergency rooms seeking care, hospitals turned them away because the care they needed was an abortion. They were then forced to suffer through immense pain and illness before eventually dying an entirely preventable death. Women dying from abortion bans is disgusting, and it is predictable. Women dying is also the point.

Under draconian abortion bans, doctors can face fines, the loss of their licenses and jail time for performing an abortion if a prosecutor doesn’t believe the abortion fits within extremely narrow exceptions, assuming any exemptions even exist. The “exceptions” carved out in some states, like Texas, are so useless and vague that they might as well not exist. That’s why over 100 Texas OB-GYNs have published an open letter to lawmakers urging changes to the state’s abortion ban: 

The nature of the strict abortion ban in Texas does not allow us as medical professionals to do our jobs. The law does not allow Texas women to get the lifesaving care they need and threatens physicians with life imprisonment and loss of licensure for doing what is often medically necessary for the patient’s health and future fertility. …

As OB-GYNs in Texas, we know firsthand how much these laws restrict our ability to provide our patients with quality, evidence-based care.

As the gruesome and deadly reality of abortion bans is exposed, I’ve observed people suggesting the lawmakers who put these bans in place surely could not have understood the harm that would befall women. These legislators were and are simply misguided in their largely religiously fueled attempts to restrict women’s bodily autonomy. Surely, if they understood that abortion is the medically necessary treatment for a miscarriage, an ectopic pregnancy, the premature rupture of membranes and so many other serious conditions, they would have written better laws, created more exceptions and taken steps to ensure pregnant people’s safety. 

Perhaps for some lawmakers, this is the truth. After all, most legislators are not doctors, let alone OB-GYNs. They do not have expertise in medicine, and they likely didn’t bother to seek out credible expertise when crafting laws regulating women’s bodies. There are probably at least a handful of lawmakers who were so deadset on ending abortion that they didn’t pause to consider what exactly an abortion really is or all the reasons abortions are performed. Personally, I think though that this is far too charitable a theory to apply to all or even most state lawmakers across the country who wrote or voted for abortion bans. 

What if the reality is that women dying is not an accident, not an oversight, not a cruel unforeseen consequence? What if women dying is actually the point?

For one, the religious extremists behind abortion bans believe that women who have sex outside of marriage should be punished. Punishment should not just be social, but physical, up to and including death. Their far-right fundamentalist brand of Christianity argues that women exist to be subjugated by men. A woman’s purpose is to be a wife, a mother, and maybe someday a matron who helps groom younger women for these roles. If a woman defies her purpose, she must face consequences.

Christian nationalists are taking this disturbing ideology from behind the closed doors of their homes and churches and attempting to impose it on the entire country. That’s what’s happening in Georgia and Texas. As author and survivor of Christian fundamentalism Tia Levings has repeatedly pointed out, Christian nationalists want to rule over America the same way they rule over their families: with an iron fist that does not allow dissent.

This ideology leaves no room for women to disagree with the men who lord over them or the women who prop those men up in order to preserve what little power they’ve personally accumulated. A woman who dares to have sex outside of marriage — especially for pleasure and not the purpose of procreation — has no place in this system. 

To the lawmakers who share this view, unmarried women, such as Nevaeh Crain, must pay a price for failing to “save themselves” for marriage. Nevaeh Crain was an 18 year old who died in Texas after developing sepsis from a miscarriage that the hospital refused to treat because of the state’s abortion ban. Her death was entirely preventable and foreseeable. Her punishment for the sin of sex outside of marriage was death.

But wait, you say, some of the women dying from lack of abortion care are married. These women are having sex within the confines of marriage just as calvinistic fire and brimstone Christianity preaches, and in some cases these women probably intended to become pregnant. This is true. Obviously a married woman is not immune from life-threatening pregnancy complications.

This leads me to my second point: In a system where women exist for the sole purpose of being wives and mothers, what use is a woman who cannot carry a healthy pregnancy to term? As Martin Luther once said, “If a woman grows weary and at last dies from childbearing, it matters not. Let her die from bearing, she is there to do it.”

It’s eugenics by another name. Abortion bans are a way of weeding out the weak, eliminating women who are no good to the white Christian nationalist world order. If a woman is predisposed to pregnancy complications and she dies because she can’t access the care she needs, that’s an unfortunate but necessary speed bump on the road to a Christian fundamentalist utopia (a dystopia for literally everyone else).

I mention white Christian nationalism specifically because abortion bans are disproportionately affecting women of color. This fundamentalist religious movement is not only sexist, it’s racist, too. It’s not just about forcing women to have babies: It’s about forcing the correct women to have babies, namely white women. 

This sounds so incredibly harsh and cruel that it’s difficult to believe. But I believe it. Consider the following:

A Journal of the American Medical Association study estimates that there have been over 64,000 pregnancies from rape in states with abortion bans since Roe v. Wade was overturned. Several states with total abortion bans, including Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma, do not have any exceptions for rape or incest. Indeed, allegedly pro-life, pro-family, Christian fundamentalist lawmakers see no problem forcing women and girls to carry their rapist’s baby, even if their rapist is a family member. Abhorrent, but not shocking. Why is it implausible that legislators who see no problem with this would also fail to see a problem with women dying from preventable pregnancy-related deaths?

Leading voices of the far-right, Christian nationalist movement have argued that women shouldn’t even be allowed to vote. MAGA Pastor Doug Wilson claims that the 19th Amendment has hurt families because giving women the right to vote has allowed Americans to believe the “lie” that we’re all individuals, not just automatons in the fundamentalist Christian baby mill. It makes sense that an ideology that believes women shouldn’t even be viewed as individual human beings would see women dying from lack of abortion care as a necessary, even positive, consequence of abortion bans.

Two Texas lawmakers recently filed bills to create new exceptions in the state’s abortion ban: One exception would permit doctors to perform an abortion “necessary to preserve the pregnant patient’s physical or mental health, including preservation of the patient’s fertility.” A second exception would permit abortions “because of a lethal fetal anomaly or diagnosis” or “because of a life-limiting diagnosis that indicates the existence of the fetus outside the womb is incompatible with life without extraordinary medical interventions.”

These exceptions are too little, too late. Women have already died and are at risk of dying or suffering long-lasting harm due to the Texas abortion ban. While these exceptions sound nice in theory, if passed they’ll almost certainly prove to be as useless as the few exceptions that already exist. The bottom line is that exceptions do not work. 

Abortion bans kill women — and that’s the point.

Sammi Lawrence is a staff attorney at FFRF. She first joined FFRF as the Anne Nicol Gaylor Legal Fellow in June 2022 and previously worked for FFRF as a legal intern while attending law school at the University of Wisconsin. She graduated with her Juris Doctor from UW-Law in May 2022. www.ffrf.org